Counter-Strike: Condition Zero

We've previously taken in Chatty's perspective on Counter-Strike's milestone 15th anniversary. But some of our posters opted to remember Valve's shooter by sharing some memorable videos. Some of them show off some classic glitches, memorable rage moments, and classic mods. There are also a few others that celebrate Chatty's legacy, showing off some classic CS gameplay from years gone by.

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Counter-Strike turns 15: A Chatty retrospective

Jun 23, 2014

It started as a simple mod to a classic first-person PC shooter. Taking Valve's original Half-Life, a pair of programmers tinkered with the game's script and worked to turn it into a team-based multiplayer romp. The result was a mod called Counter-Strike, which turned 15 on June 19 of this year. Since then, it turned into a retail release and quickly ballooned into a global phenomenon, becoming one of the most influential and beloved multiplayer experiences ever created.
As a website with its roots firmly entrenched in PC gaming, Shacknews' Chatty community has some fond memories of battling Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists across the years. Their recollections range from unforgettable encounters, to funny bugs and glitches, to nights that just went on without end. This is a collection of memories from our community about Valve's Counter-Strike.

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Losing it: Why bad players keep trying with good games

Feb 19, 2014

Image via Steam user MVDK.

Written by Matt Thrower

Fifteen years ago I thought myself the god of Unreal Tournament: an untouchable colossus of speed and firepower tearing through every difficulty level with consummate ease. So naturally, as soon as I got broadband I tried out for a high ranking clan. They wiped the floor with me, blowing my avatar asunder with the same insouciance I had playing against the bots and laughing as they fell before me.

It was the beginning of a long and illustrious career of being Very Bad Indeed at online games. Yet here I remain, regularly clocking hours on Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and DayZ and regularly left propping up the leaderboards.

I m hardly alone. Public servers commonly have their fair share of deadbeats alongside the clan members and twitch kiddies who rule the maps. The gaming demographic increasingly includes middle-aged people with kids and mortgages who want to kick back in the evening and have some fun, but don t have the free time to practice. And, predictably, the more experienced players slaughter them, time and time again. Why do we keep coming back for more pain?Suckers for punishmentLennart Nacke, who researches affective gaming and entertainment computing at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, suggests it might be connected to something he calls the feedback loop of self-regulation. We need four things to regulate our behavior: standards, monitoring, strength and motivation, he tells me. People in online games form their standard by participating in matches and monitoring their own performance. Every time they engage in another match they get feedback on their prior performance and adjust their current efforts.

But doesn t that mean that practice would eventually lower their motivation when they reached their desired standard? The randomness of the players and the randomness in the twitch games themselves mean the standard is constantly adjusting, he says. It keeps the players in a monitoring loop of their own behavior and this leads them to come back.

StarCraft 2: Making you wish you had extra hands since 2010.

This desire to practice and improve is a colossal motivator, an effect more widely known as positive reinforcement. Mia Consalvo, Research Chair in Game Studies at Concordia University, agrees and she has some data to back up her opinion.

In my research on why people cheat, I found that most players went to great effort not to cheat they wanted to earn their achievements in games fairly, via their own efforts, she says. This leads me to believe that often, players really want that sense of accomplishment that comes from their own efforts and skills via play. That suggests that such players are earnest in wanting to advance in the game. And here that takes the form of multiple plays, even without success.

There s substantial research to back up the hypothesis that, counter-intuitively, failure actually encourages further participation. A 2011 study of internet chess by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Sami Abuhamdeh suggested that players actively chose more capable opponents, and had the most fun against people that they beat only 25 percent of the time, on average.

This seemingly contradictory enjoyment of failure has a parallel in philosophy known as the tragedy paradox. Why do people actively enjoy works of art that prompt unpleasant emotions such as sadness and fear? There s no straightforward answer, but we re all familiar with the experience of bellowing the rage and frustration engendered by failure at the screen, and then quite sincerely telling our friends how great the game was.

Lennart points out that video games offer a uniquely good environment to explore this effect. They put us in an explicit rule context, where our boundaries are known and we can quickly observe the skills of other players, he tells me. This framing of a game allows us to set clear a goal for our behavior and it is much easier to monitor our progress than in real life, where the rules are not clear and the skills of our opponents would be unknown to us.

Raging against the machineLennart's explanation doesn't entirely explain why gamers like me, who ll simply never have the time or the reflexes to beat the teenage experts that throng the servers, continue to play in the face of repeated maulings. I know I m a hopeless case, so it can t just be the lure of potential improvement that keeps me going.

What s particularly interesting is how this attitude contrasts with that engendered by overly difficult solo games. We ve all played games with excessive learning curves and uneven difficulty spikes, and often the response is annoyance and frustration followed by throwing in the towel. It seems to me there must be something qualitatively different in playing against other people, but what?

Consalvo thinks that it might just be me. I've known players that have attempted particular moves or levels in single player games up to 100 times, she relates, so we can't say they would just give up against the computer. It seems to depend on the persistence of the player and their investment in a particular game. Players will vary widely at their 'frustration point' where they will give up.

Quake Live: Browser play means it's even easier to lose than ever before.

Equally, some of those effects that make failure actively pleasurable when playing online also apply to the offline world. Nick Yee, a research scientist who s been studying online games for over a decade, points out that it used to be near impossible to beat games. Most people who played Pac-Man or Tetris never beat the game, but they kept playing because it provided a challenge and allowed them to sense their own improvement.

It s the same psychological feedback loop that we ve already encountered. Winning in itself isn't necessary to create engagement, Nick says. In fact, one could argue that not winning at Pac-Man and Tetris were precisely what kept people playing.

Lennart, however, suggests it might be related to the unpredictability of a human opponent when compared to a bot. If the standard of the game is too high, the frustration threshold will be hard to overcome for players, he tells me. But against humans, the randomness of the opponent influences how we build our standard and makes it harder to form comparisons, essentially keeping us engaged for longer because we haven t yet met the standard that we rebuild every time we engage in gameplay. Friendship through failureThis was starting to chime a little better with my personal experience. Maybe the attraction is as simple as the humanizing element; the huge pull we have toward sharing activities, even if it s with faceless strangers who might be thousands of miles away and want nothing more than to repeatedly blow us to pieces.

Mia thinks that could well be the case. Being social is not always about communicating it is also about engaging in a shared activity with others, she says. Sometimes that means simply being among other people; it could mean engaging in a group quest or even PvP or other competitions.

The point that you don t have to talk or even text with other players online in order to feel a sense of companionship from them is also one that Lennart makes. They are just enjoying the company of other people and even if they could not communicate with other players directly, they are still enjoying the shared language of playing the game.

Dota 2: So complex, you can deny opponents XP by killing your own minions.

Lennart and some colleagues ran a study on this hypothesis, analyzing several months of log files from a large site that matches players for online board and card games. They found that while user s behavior mirrored many aspects of real-life socialization, they were forming only transient relationships and talking very little. What could explain their actions?

The main point here is that games themselves are a form of communication, he tells me. They allow us to communicate with other humans by monitoring and comparing our behaviors in the game to others and witnessing personal growth in an easy to understand constrained environment. Games, even the competitive ones, are in my opinion one of the most social ways we can interact using technology today.

And there s my answer. I play a lot of board and card games, and have long been aware that a big part of the draw for me is the enjoying the company of friends and family and gaming at the same time. I m no good at those games either, but I do have a fantastic repertoire of funny stories about my spectacular failures.

So I m happy to carry on being the bottom of the pile just to have the pleasure of knowing that behind all the nicknames on top of me are real people, and I ve contributed to their game, their narrative, their own repertoire of anecdotes. Whatever my losses in the game, I ve won a little victory in my real world life.

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Daily Deal - Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, 75% Off

Apr 22, 2013

Today's Deal: Save 75% on Counter-Strike: Condition Zero!

Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!

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Counter-Strike: Condition Zero assaults Linux

Mar 7, 2013

Continuing its adventures into Linux, Valve has released a penguin-friendly edition of another of its games, bringing the total to five. Could it be Left 4 Dead? Portal 2? HL2: Episode Two? Gosh, even Episode 3? Er, no, it's Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Still, that's nice, isn't it?

Condition Zero added single-player to the CS world, facing off against snazzy bots. The development was a bit of a mess, started with Rogue Entertainment in 2000 then going to Gearbox, passed to Ritual Entertainment, and finally finished and released by Turtle Rock Studios in 2004. Yes, the gang who went on to create Left 4 Dead. The end result was a so-so mish-mash of scrapped, restarted, reworked and remade content, but shooting men is generally fun.

CZ joins Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Source, and Team Fortress 2 on Linux. If you've already bought the games for Windows or Mac, you now have the Linux version free too.

Valve says it's releasing Linux editions of more of its games "in the coming weeks and months." Good things come to those who wait. Valve's looking to get prototypes of its 'Steam Box' living room PCs--expected to have Linux as at least an option--into people's hands in 3-4 months, so the more Linux games the merrier. Steam now stocks 80 Linux games in total.

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CS:CZ CONTINUES VALVE LINUX CATALOG

Mar 6, 2013

Counter-Strike: Condition Zero (CS:CZ) is now available for Linux players via Steam. CS:CZ is the fifth Valve title to be released for Linux and, with its release, pushes the total number of Linux games available on Steam to 80.

Launched just three weeks ago, the Steam for Linux client is available for free from the Ubuntu Software Center. More Valve titles are heading to Linux in the coming weeks and months.

For more information, please visit http://steamcommunity.com/linux

Product Update

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive updated with two new maps

Oct 1, 2012

Valve updated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive today with two additional maps and a refit of the Classic Competitive matchmaking system. Vertigo, a classic Defusal map, returns with a Source facelift to its multi-leveled mayhem and shadowy camping nest corners, while Monastery chills things out with an Arms Race among the snowy promenades of a windswept temple.

Classic Competitive matchmaking now involves queuing up until 10 player matches are found before starting a game. Group queuing and matchmaking with friends are also possible through a "Play with Friends" option. Head over to Global Offensive's website for a short FAQ on the new matchmaking.

CS:GO should be with us come summer, according to Valve, giving us a bit of time to train our mouse hand muscles and hone our twitch headshot skills before inevitably suffering repetitive death at the hands of seasoned CS 1.6 pros on release. Those pros can't touch console bros, though. Valve's Chet Faliszeck yesterday told Joystiq cross-platform play is gone from CS:GO. Awww.

There's a good reason, though. "The beta has proved we want to update not just the beta, but the game itself post-launch frequently on the PC," Faliszeck told Joystiq, "To do that we need to separate the platforms so one doesn't hamstring the other. So for that, we have removed the idea of cross-platform play -- essentially make all platforms stronger by not mixing them."

Seems fair. It'll mean more updates for us PC players, most likely. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is currently in beta. You can complete a Steam survey for a chance to claim a spot ahead of release. Meanwhile, let me introduce you to some new CS:GO screenshots. I'm sure you'll get on like a house on fire.

PC Gamer

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Arsenal modes make Gun Game official, new screenshots out

Sep 22, 2011

Valve are incorporating the immensely popular Gun Game mod as official modes in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Arsenal: Arms Race and Arsenal: Demolition are the two new modes. They'll be playable across eight new maps created with help from the creators of the original mod.

Gun Game replaces Counter-Strike's cash-for-guns system with a kills-for-guns system. Everyone starts with a pistol and gets a new weapon for every kill. Those unfamiliar with Counter-Strike might recognise a very similar mode appearing in Call of Duty: Black Ops, but the original CS mod was the real deal, and it will get official backing when CS:GO is released early next year.

Valve have sent over nine new screenshots, showing some lovely jungle areas. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive doesn't seem to be pushing the Source engine especially hard, but it's a significant step up from Counter-Strike: Source.

PC Gamer

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Arsenal modes make Gun Game official, new screenshots out

Sep 22, 2011

Valve are incorporating the immensely popular Gun Game mod as official modes in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Arsenal: Arms Race and Arsenal: Demolition are the two new modes. They'll be playable across eight new maps created with help from the creators of the original mod.

Gun Game replaces Counter-Strike's cash-for-guns system with a kills-for-guns system. Everyone starts with a pistol and gets a new weapon for every kill. Those unfamiliar with Counter-Strike might recognise a very similar mode appearing in Call of Duty: Black Ops, but the original CS mod was the real deal, and it will get official backing when CS:GO is released early next year.

Valve have sent over nine new screenshots, showing some lovely jungle areas. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive doesn't seem to be pushing the Source engine especially hard, but it's a significant step up from Counter-Strike: Source.